Meet Guillaume Cabane, former VP of Growth at Segment (and current VP of Growth here at Drift.)

A few months back, Guillaume had an idea:

He wanted to start engaging with potential customers in real-time — while they were live on the Segment website.

There was just one issue holding him back…

Guillaume knew that only around 10% of the people who visited the Segment website were an ideal fit for the product.

So in order to make sure nobody’s time or energy would be wasted, he needed a way to filter out the 90% of folks who weren’t a good fit.

“16% of our signups represent 86% of our revenue,” he told us. “Those are the people we want to talk to!”

But as Guillaume soon realized, traditional solutions don’t offer that type of targeting and control.

He needed something more powerful.

Drift: Reinventing Marketing & Sales Software

Drift was built from the ground-up to help sales teams make money.It’s a conversation-driven marketing and sales platform that gives teams control over the flow of leads to their websites.

One of our goals at Drift is to make managing the balance between lead volume and lead quality as simple as turning a dial.

Turn the dial to the left, and you can open the flood gates and engage with everyone who lands on your site.

Turn the dial to the right, and you can display chat to a much smaller percentage of visitors based on your target criteria.

Turning the Dial: Segment’s Targeted Messaging Campaigns

In order to zoom in on the 10% of website visitors who were a good fit for Segment, Guillaume decided to implement Drift on the Segment website.

He then created a messaging campaign that appears only to anonymous visitors who meet his specific targeting conditions.

At the heart of Guillaume’s qualification system is IP address → domain matching powered by Clearbit, which surfaces the names of companies that anonymous visitors work at. If Segment’s lead-scoring model shows a company is a good fit, employees of that company will see a personalized message when they drop by the Segment website.

No, personalization isn’t new. And neither is live chat for that matter. But what is newis using live chat and personalization to help you generate and qualify leads.

For Guillaume and the Segment growth team, this new approach has been paying off in a big way.

Segment + Drift: By the Numbers

Within the first 3 weeks of implementing Drift, live chat became Segment’s 3rd-strongest source of qualified opportunities. Today, Drift is Segment’s #1 source of qualified opportunities.

Year-to-date, Drift has been the strongest contributor to Segment’s growth in 2017.

As a result of setting up personalized campaigns for anonymous visitors, Segment saw a:

5x increase in engagement (people clicking on the chat CTA)

2x increase in conversations

Overall, Guillaume’s team has doubled the number of qualified opportunities they generate from live chat each month, and that’s led to thousands of dollars in incremental MRR & pipeline each month.

In light of those facts, this next stat probably won’t come as a surprise:

100% of Segment sales reps now love Guillaume.

Seriously though. Segment’s sales reps love the new approach because it’s creating tons of highly targeted conversations for them. (And because reps now know ahead of time what companies people work at, they’re better prepared for those conversations.)

The takeaway from the Segment story isn’t that you need to completely shift your sales and marketing operation to be 100% focused on messaging. Instead, you can simply do what Guillaume did and add Drift to your website as a “second net.”

Using Drift as a Second Net

When you look at this screenshot of the Segment website, what do you see?

I see a clean-looking B2B website. It has a testimonial video featuring Segment customers. It has a primary CTA that prompts folks to enter an email address and create a free account.

When Guillaume decided to start using Drift, he didn’t need to change any of that.

Guillaume didn’t need to up-end any existing processes in order to make room for Drift.

Instead, he simply added it to the Segment website and treated it like a second net for getting more qualified opportunities into Segment’s sales funnel.

Interested in setting up your website’s second net? Click the button below and we’ll help you get started.

See why thousands of businesses use Drift to generate leads & close deals faster.